Who’s Who at the Values Voter Summit: A Guide to the Anti-Gay, Anti-Muslim, Anti-Mormon, Anti-Choice Activists Spending the Weekend with the GOP

This weekend, nearly every major GOP presidential candidate, along with the top two Republicans in the House of Representatives, will speak at the
Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of the leaders of the movement to integrate fundamentalist Christianity and American politics.

The candidates – Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich – and the congressmen – House Speaker John
Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor – will join a who’s who of the far Right at the event.
The organizers of the Values Voter Summit and many of its prominent attendees are on the frontlines of removing hard-won rights for gay and lesbian
Americans, restricting women’s access to reproductive healthcare, undermining the free exercise rights of non-Christian religions and breaking down the
wall of separation between church and state.

In perhaps the starkest illustration of how far even mainstream Republican candidates are willing to go to appease the Religious Right, Mitt Romney is
scheduled to speak immediately before the American
Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, a man whose
record of hate speech

should be shocking by any standard. Along with regularly denigrating gays and lesbians, Muslims, and other minority groups, Fischer has no love for
Romney’s Mormon faith. In a radio program last week, Fischer insisted that Mormons have no right to religious freedom under the First Amendment and
falsely claimed that the LDS Church still sanctions polygamy.

The following is a guide to some of the individuals with whom the leaders of the GOP will be rubbing shoulders at the Values Voter Summit this year.

Bryan Fischer

Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issues Analysis at the American Family Association, which is a sponsor of the Values Voter Summit. Fischer acts as the
chief spokesman for the group and also hosts its flagship radio program, Focal Point, on which he has interviewed a number of prominent figures
including Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum and Mike Huckabee.

said that the anti-Muslim manifesto of the right-wing Christian terrorist who killed dozens in Norway was “accurate.”

At a speech at last year’s Values Voter Summit, Fischer said that
if Christians don’t get involved in politics, they “make a deliberate decision to turn over the running of the United States government to atheists and
pagans.” Of the gay rights movement, he warned, “We are going to have to choose, as a nation, between the homosexual agenda and freedom, because the
two cannot coexist.”

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council, the main organizer of this weekend’s summit. Perkins leads the group’s efforts against gay
rights, abortion rights and church/state separation.

The FRC famously expressed its hostility to religious pluralism in a 2000 statement blasting a Hindu priest who was invited to give an opening prayer in Congress:
“[W]hile it is true that the United States of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all, that liberty was never intended
to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country’s heritage…. Our Founders … would have found utterly incredible the idea
that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference.”

denied that there was a correlation between anti-gay bullying and depression and suicide, saying instead that gay and lesbian teens know they are “abnormal” and
“have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict”;

Retired Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin sparked a controversy when, as a high-ranking official in the Bush Defense Department, he framed the War
on Terror as a holy war against Islam. He has since built a career as a
Religious Right speaker, specializing in anti-Muslim rhetoric and
anti-Obama conspiracy theories. Boykin rejects religious freedom for American Muslims, claiming that Islam “is
not just a religion, it is a totalitarian way of life.” In an interview with Bryan Fischer, he called for “no mosques in America.”

Boykin is a leading member of the dominionist group The Oak Initiative. In a speech at the group’s conference in April, he declared that George Soros
and the Council on Foreign Relations
conspired to collapse the U.S. economy

Parker is a long-time Religious Right activist who is particularly active in anti-gay and anti-abortion rights work. As Washington, DC was poised to
legalize marriage equality, Parker warned that it would lead to more HIV infections in the city, which would “ transform officially into Sodom.” In a recent radio interview
with Tony Perkins, Parker mused that black family life was “ more healthy” under slavery than it is
today and has accused liberals of treating Justice Clarence Thomas and Gov. Sarah Palin like runaway slaves. She
has called legal abortion a “genocide” on par with
slavery and the Holocaust.

(Kagan is Jewish). Jackson has even described his political efforts in apocalyptic terms,
telling a Religious Right group before the 2010 elections, “God is saying to us ‘I want to pick a fight in which I can wipe out my enemies and cause
them to be silenced once and for all.’ This is where America is; if we do not recognize and repent, we are going to see our way of life destroyed as we
now know it.”

this year. Members of Rose’s group, Live Action, went to Planned Parenthood clinics around the country posing as clients seeking help with a child sex
trafficking ring. Planned Parenthood alerted the FBI about the activity, and the one staffer who handled the supposed traffickers inappropriately was
promptly fired. Nevertheless, Rose claimed that her hoax proved “beyond a shadow of a doubt that Planned Parenthood intentionally breaks state and
federal laws and covers up the abuse of young girls it claims to serve.”

Until Beck’s Fox News program was canceled earlier this year, he was one of the Right’s most visible fear-mongers and conspiracy theorists. When his violent rhetoric
inspired some real threats against progressive leaders, he laughed off the critics who urged him to choose his words more responsibly. Beck’s elaborate
conspiracy theories include the idea that socialists and Islamists were planning a global caliphate, with the help of
American progressives; an obsession with the progressive funder George Soros, at whom he leveled a number of anti-Semitic smears including a personal
attack that the Anti-Defamation league called “horrific”; and a distrust of President
Obama, who he once said was “racist” with a “ deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

(for instance, poisoning Nancy Pelosi’s wine), but frequently insisted that it is progressives who were urging violence, even predicting his own
martyrdom. In one 2010 broadcast, he warned that “anarchists, Marxists, communists, revolutionaries, Maoists” have to “eliminate 10 percent of the U.S.
population” in order to “gain control.”

After a terrorist in Oslo killed dozens of young members of Norway’s Labor Party at an island summer camp, Beck
attacked the victims